The first bout showed two tough-looking men, superb physically, trying to get the better of each other with no holds barred. It was spectacular and deadly, but not unfamiliar. Stranger things were to come.
Ladies and Gents
The next bout was between two women, one dressed in what amounted to a white bathing costume, and the other in black. There was an attempt at the same brutality, but entirely of a different kind.
The Woman in White (never mind Wilkie Collins) took her opponent by a strangle grip and slammed her to the floor on her back. While there, she took her opponent by another complicated grip and did exactly the same thing. The referee stopped this bout when the possibility of murder was nigh.
The final presentation was really unbelievable. Each corner of the ring was occupied by a superbly-built wrestler, sworn to murder the other three.
The fundamental tactic was to throw the opponent (or maybe three of them) right out of the ring among the spectators. Bashes on the face with bare fists were a commonplace, and the feet were used as often as the fists.
One could write a lot about this exposition of brutality but I am afraid that the conclusion must be that we have all enjoyed very, very rough stuff so long as other people are involved.
From Clongowes to Martello tower
Well, boys-ah-dear, there was the queer hosting at the Forty-Foot swimming hole, Sandycove, Dun Laoire, when a great number of people – perhaps 200 – gathered to honour James Joyce.
His great book Ulysses is very long (my own edition is in two volumes) but its events are confined to a single day and night, namely June 16, 1904; and its opening is located on the top of the Martello Tower at Sandycove where Joyce himself, Oliver St John Gogarty and an Englishman were in residence.
Ceremony?
On display in the tower itself were various relics of the master, including letters, printers’ proofs and his death-mask, the last-mentioned an extremely successful cast, ironically a thing in death that was extremely life-like.
The location of Saturday’s ceremony (if drinking small ones and cups of tea can be called a ceremony) afforded a curious historical conspectus. Those towers are an echo of the Napoleonic wars when the British with three ships of the line and two frigates sought with artillery to subdue a tower commanding the Gulf of San Fiorenzo.
It was only through a sheer accident – the igniting of junk on the tower which should not have been there at all – that it was eventually taken. When it was found that the tower had only two 18-pounder guns, the military lesson was obvious and was quickly learned by the British. The fear of the French invasion of the home territory was immediately provided against by the wholesale erection of the so-called Martello towers around the whole coast of England and along the eastern shores of Ireland. They are so solid and massive as to be virtually indestructible and many centuries hence will no doubt rank with our round towers as objects of speculation and wonder.
The Clongowes Boy
The wonder of Saturday’s event was that it happened at all. Even ten years ago it would have been unthinkable but in more recent years the austerity and beauty of Joyce’s work is finding acceptance in quarters where it had formerly won condemnation without any investigation of its worth. Even as an historical portrait not only of Dublin but of an age Ulysses is unique.
Joyce has left a full picture of his early self in his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, one of the finest autobiographies in the English language. To a large extent however all his writing concerns himself, his life and times. Many chance acquaintances, including people who wished him ill, have been immortalised.
Having at last shed the silly mantle of purveyor of erotica, Joyce emerges from contemporary accounts of him as a very shy man, punctilious in manner and very formal in modes of address. Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris who had the courage to publish Ulysses originally in 1922 and who was present on Saturday at Sandycove, an alert lady of 75, was never known or referred to by Joyce otherwise than Miss Beach.
Joyce went to school at Belvedere College and Clongowes, both institutions run by the Jesuit Fathers, and left Ireland for good at the age of 22. Left it physically, that is. His mind and memory never left Dublin. He died in 1941‚ during the war. Would it not be an idea to disinter the remains and rebury him at his own beloved city?
James Joyce, was born on February 2, 1882, at Rathgar and from Clongowes went to University College, Dublin, where he specialised in modern languages. He went to Paris in 1904 and for the rest of his life lived variously in France, Italy and Switzerland.
His last work, Finnegans Wake, is accepted as one of the most complicated and obscure pieces of writing ever to see print and if there is substance in the common belief that great mental stress and worry lead to ulcers, it is understandable that his death arose following collapse from duodenal ulcers amid the chaos of the German occupation of France.
Friends at this time urgently counselled him to go to the Irish Minister in Paris and get his British passport changed for an Irish one, for it was known that the German authorities regarded him as a British spy. He refused, saying ‘it would not be honourable’.
Owed Nothing
That was another manifestation of his stiffness and formality. He certainly owed the British nothing, for they were the first to burn Ulysses: of 500 copies landed at Folkestone in January, 1923, the Customs Authorities seized 499.
T.S. Eliot has remarked that Joyce was the greatest master of the English language since Milton. Let us leave it at that.
My sympathies to the Carlovians
Call it delusion, hallucination, folly or just plain original sin, it is something the Irish are very prone to, though it is known all over the world: I mean this custom on the part of people who know nothing whatsoever about horse racing and who have no interest in it whereby they have a bet on a horse provided only the race is big, that is what we more knowledgeable characters call a classic.
Humdrum races at such places as Newbury, Doncaster, Mullingar or Newmarket do not count. But if the race be the Grand National or the Derby, then Mr Innocent dives into the pocket wherein he keeps the fivers. His betting, usually on a substantial scale, distorts the market and tends to annoy the regulars. And they become quite infuriated when Mr Innocent wins, as he frequently does.
Occult Method
Occasionally he tamely accepts a ‘certainty’ but generally he has his own mysterious methods of finding the winner – methods which are occult, arcane, or based on formulae more in keeping with the practices of the witch-doctor.
Take that affair at the Curragh. The main event was the Sweep Derby. The innocents in their regiments came forward to find the winner of this uniquely rewarding (to the horse owners) event. On the face of it, the thing was obvious.
The term Sweep Derby contains 10 letters: therefore the winner must be a horse whose name is spelt in 10 letters. This line of reasoning cuts out aberrations and distractions such as breeding, racing form, previous racing record, the ‘going’ and so on. It seems a godsend, an inspired short-cut; never mind if it has an odd cabalistic quality.
Only two horses in the race had names amounting to 10 letters. One was Saint Denys, ridden by the well-known P. Canty, heavily tipped in the papers and fairly heavily backed. The starting price was 100/7. Alas, it was not placed.
Outside the Rules
Perhaps, however, it was outside the rules by reason of having a name of two words. The other genuine 10-letter horse was Tambourine. Tambourine won, of course, at 10/1. The favourite Larkspur (a meagre thing of only eight letters) was 9/4, so that Tambourine’s price was generous and well worthwhile.
The race was run on a Saturday, which is an eight-letter word. That gives the racecourse mystic an embarrassingly wide choice as between Larkspur, Gail Star, Borghese, Our Guile, Solpetre and Trimatic. I imagine that, finding the portents so multi-faced, he would discard all of those horses and try for another formula.
Sometimes some of the innocents back a
horse because, utterly irrespective of his record or the odds, they like his name. Who would begrudge the innocents the few quid they made when Tipperary Tim won the Grand National as a total outsider at 100/1? Not I, for my father backed him and later made me a present of a toy machine-gun. I don’t think there was any symbolism involved there.
Another method I have heard of is to find out on what saint’s feastday the big race is to be run and then to find the horse who seems related in some way to the saint. I can’t say whether such prognostication is religious, superstitious or sacrilegious; I should merely state that it is unreliable.
Now and again Mr Innocent and Mr Well-tried can become interchangeable, and I feel bold enough to sympathise with a great many Carlow people for all the money they lost last Saturday on London Gazette. This animal was bought cheaply to be set up as the object of a raffle in aid of Carlow Golf Club, whose club-house had been burnt to the ground.
Auctioned
The lady who won him put him up for auction and under his new owners and trained by Tom Jones, did really well in England. For the Sweep Derby, his jockey was confident enough to say, ‘This fellow will win.’ Any decent Carlowman would feel it treasonable to back any other horse, and for a local golfer it would be plain heresy. Well, starting at 33/1, he was not napped at all.
I’m afraid there is no useful conclusion to this soliloquy of mine, if it not be that most reverend old adage – ‘betting on horses is worse than drink.’
Some British delusions about the Irish
The Irish people have a number of failings. So, of course, have other peoples, but it might be worthwhile glancing at those of the Irish if only to acquit them of many failings attributed to them by others which they haven’t got at all.
The people who suffer most from delusions about the Irish are the British (or perhaps it would be fairer to say the English). The Englishman’s attitude, I should add, however mistaken, is not hostile; in fact it is usually indulgent.
Perhaps the primary delusion of the Englishman is that the Irish spend most of their time fighting each other. Whether the fighting is done with fists or shillelaghs is not material, as no real damage is ever done.
There is no motive for these fights, no issue, nothing at stake, no casus belli – not even jealousy over a pretty colleen.
It was just fighting for the love of it. I believe ‘trailing his coat’ was a phrase originally invented in relation to the Irishman.
I note, incidentally, from many American publications that the word donnybrook (thus with a small ‘d’) is used in the sense of a violent row. I once lived in Donnybrook and can certify that it is a most peaceable and God-fearing district. The ‘donny-’ part of the word is the Gaelic domhnach, or church.
The Glass
The Englishman’s second important belief about the Irishman is that he is always drunk. There is a shred of logic in this belief if one accepts the preceding proposition that Irishmen are also always fighting, for too much liquor can lead to blows. But there is not much sign of logic in the subordinate beliefs. Ireland is in fact a cattle-raising country and, disreputable as it may sound in theory, we have to import annually a considerable amount of wheat wherewith to make bread.
But the Englishman never sees Paddy driving, selling or owning a cow. The one animal he loves and cherishes is the pig. Not infrequently the pig lives in the house with him, rather as the Englishman himself allows his dog to dwell with him. Already the Irishman is an unusual character – drunk, fighting and having a pig in the kitchen.
How does he (and the pig, for that matter) sustain life? Both subsist on one foodstuff only – spuds. The failure of the potato crop caused the great Famine of 1845–7.
In bygone years he used to drink (in addition to potheen and lethal home-made whiskey) buttermilk but the expansion of the creamery industry and the decline of home churning – an exhausting activity carried out not by the Irishman but by his wife – has made buttermilk a rarity and the poor man deprived of it is often forced to the humiliation of having to drink pints of stout.
Aside from natural shortcomings (drunkenness, fighting) he has a multiplicity of subordinate failures. He is inordinately fond of gambling and will not hesitate to put his week’s wages on a horse or even on the toss of a coin.
The fact that no money remains to buy food for his wife and family if the gamble does not come off is an afterthought and not very important.
After all, what is the relieving officer for? Or those stately palaces, the County Homes?
Well, what else is there about the Englishman’s Irishman? He is dishonest. Employ him behind the counter in your public house and he will be meticulous in putting all cash into the cash register but he will quietly drink four glasses of malt every day.
If you are in business as a grocer, he will take home everything needed in the way of eatables in his own house and not a word about it. If you decide it is time for a show-down, he will listen with poorly disguised impatience to your charges and denunciation and then gently tell you he is engaged to your daughter.
All the time, no matter what he is up to, the Irishman is guilty of an abiding and usually very noticeable delinquency: he never washes himself.
He is superstitious.
He paralyses industry in Great Britain with strike after strike.
He’s a Communist under the skin.
He thinks he owns and runs the United States.
All those charges, however groundless, seem to add up to one thing: the Irishman is important.
How would you define the word Celt?
It is a biggish question, I admit. Anticipating the reader, I have just reached for the dictionary and find the answer given there surprising yet oddly in pattern with what I have to say later.
Here is what the book says:
CELT – (Low Latin celtis, a chisel, a selt.) A cutting implement resembling an axe-head, made of stone or metal, found in ancient tumuli and barrows.
A wry smile may be evoked by this disclosure that a Celt is to be found in ancient barrows, as if this was the only way to get him home on Saturday nights.
It is the practice to speak of the rather short and dark-complexioned Celtic-speaking people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as Celts, although the ancient writers seem to have applied the term ‘Celt’ chiefly to folk of great stature, with fair hair and blue or grey eyes.
See where that leaves us? We are sort of international tramps, and we’re not sure who we are.
If someone were to say, possibly by way of sneer, that one of my forebears was Brian Boru, I wouldn’t be in a position to challenge the assertion.
I would probably mutter something like, ‘Aw well, he fought the Danes, which is more than the Milk Marketing Board is doing today’ and then shamble out, pretending I had to catch a bus. There is a lot to be said for keeping history in the schoolroom.
But recently I came across by accident a piece of literature which to some extent enlightened me, not to say shocked me.
It is a paper read before the Royal Irish Academy on 26th January last by Professor J. J. Tierney, who occupies the chair of Greek in UCD, entitled ‘The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius’ (now available in print, Hodges, Figgis & Co., Dublin, 9/–).
It would be impossible and, anyhow, unfair, to try to convey here what Professor Tierney adduces as the testimony of the ancient Posidonius. Not only does the Professor give chapter and verse but also the texts relied on.
I stumbled through page after page of Greek and then tangled with the Latin recitals (Greek is much easier to read than Latin) – only to discover, at the heel of the hunt, that English translations had been thoughtfully provided at the end.
The next section of this discourse is entirely quotation from that, and here is what Posidonius has to say about us:
The Celts sometimes engage in single combat at dinner. Assembling in arms they engage in a mock battle-drill and mutual thrust-and-parry, but sometimes wounds are inflicted and the irritatio
n caused by this may lead even to the slaying of the opponent unless the bystanders hold them back.
And in former times when the hindquarters were served up the bravest hero took the thigh piece, and if another man claimed it they stood up and fought in single combat to the death.
The Celts sit on dried grass and have their meals served up on wooden tables raised slightly above the earth. Their food consists of a small number of loaves of bread together with a large amount of meat either boiled or roasted on charcoal or on spits.
They partake of this in a cleanly but leonine fashion, raising up whole limbs in both hands and biting off the meat, while any part of which is hard to tear off they cut through with a small dagger which hangs attached to their sword-sheath in its own scabbard.
The Celts have in their company, even in war (as well as in peace), companies whom they call parasites. These men pronounce their praises before the whole assembly and before each of the chieftains in turn as they listen. Their entertainments are called Bards. These are poets who deliver eulogies in song.
All about golfing
Well, I went along to the final on Sunday, the 22nd, of the Hospitals’ Sweeps golf tournament at Woodbrook, near Bray, so narrowly won by Christy O’Connor. How sound are your nerves? How would you like £1,000 to hang on the attempt at one final putt on the last green?
I am personally no stranger to golf. Some years ago I was induced to take up the game on the course of Delgany, near Greystones, in Wicklow. On completion of 18 holes, I found myself puffed out and exhausted.